Deforestation Drives Climate Change More Than We Thought

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Author: Lindsey Hadlock-Cornell | Published: September 6, 2017

Deforestation and use of forest lands for agriculture or pasture, particularly in tropical regions, contribute more to climate change than previously thought, research finds.

The study also shows just how significantly that impact has been underestimated. Even if all fossil fuel emissions are eliminated, if current tropical deforestation rates hold steady through 2100, there will still be a 1.5 degree increase in global warming.

“A lot of the emphasis of climate policy is on converting to sustainable energy from fossil fuels,” says Natalie M. Mahowald, the paper’s lead author and faculty director of environment for the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University.

“It’s an incredibly important step to take, but, ironically, particulates released from the burning of fossil fuels—which are severely detrimental to human health—have a cooling effect on the climate. Removing those particulates actually makes it harder to reach the lower temperatures laid out in the Paris agreement,” she explains.

She says that in addition to phasing out fossil fuels, scientific and policymaking communities must pay attention to changes in land use to stem global warming, as deforestation effects are “not negligible.”

While the carbon dioxide collected by trees and plants is released during the cutting and burning of deforestation, other greenhouse gases—specifically nitrous oxide and methane—are released after natural lands have been converted to agricultural and other human usage. The gases compound the effect of the carbon dioxide’s ability to trap the sun’s energy within the atmosphere, contributing to radiative forcing—energy absorbed by the Earth versus energy radiated off—and a warmer climate.

As a result, while only 20 percent of the rise in carbon dioxide caused by human activity originates from land use and land-cover change, that warming proportion from land use (compared with other human activities) increases to 40 percent once co-emissions like nitrous oxide and methane are factored in.

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Climate Change Already Impacting Wheat, Rice, Corn, Soybean Yields Worldwide

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Author: Jeff McMahon | Published: September 1, 2017

Increased temperatures from climate change will reduce yields of the four crops humans depend on most—wheat, rice, corn and soybeans—and the losses have already begun, according to a new meta-study by an international team of researchers.

Humans depend for two thirds of their calories on these four staple crops, but yields of wheat are expected to decrease by 6%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.

“By combining four different methods, our comprehensive assessment of the impacts of increasing temperatures on major global crops shows substantial risks for agricultural production, already stagnating in some parts of the world,” the scientists say in the study, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Yield increase has slowed down or even stagnated during the last years in some parts of the world, and further increases in temperature will continue to suppress yields, despite farmers’ adaptation efforts.” The study, led by Chuang Zhao of Peking University, cites three other studies documenting declines in crop yields in Europe, Africa, India, China, Central and South America and other regions.

The study of studies was conducted by scientists in China, Germany, Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, The Philippines, and the United States, including the University of Florida, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University in New York. They hoped to settle a question that seemed to have produced conflicting results in the many studies they reviewed: what are the effects on crop yields of temperature increases from anthropogenic climate change?

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Comunidades apuestan por la resiliencia en Jamaica

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 Por: Zadie Neufville | Publicado: 28 de agosto 2017

Ceylon Clayton trata de recuperar un proyecto de cultivo de musgo marino que él y unos amigos habían empezado hace unos años para aumentar los menguantes ingresos que perciben los pescadores de Jamaica.

Esta vez pidió ayuda externa, así como a pescadores de comunidades vecinas, para ampliar las operaciones y el santuario de peces de la zona.

Ahora Clayton encabeza un grupo de 10 pescadores de la comunidad de Little Bay, en Westmoreland, con grandes sueños de convertir al pequeño pueblo de pescadores en el mayor productor de musgo marino de este país insular.

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La FAO ayudará a América Latina a mitigar el impacto del cambio climático en su agricultura

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 Publicado: 5 de septiembre 2017

La Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO) apoyará a siete países de América Latina a mejorar su información sobre el estado y salud de sus suelos y generar sistemas agrícolas productivos y sostenibles, una medida que servirá para mitigar el cambio climático, informó hoy el organismo internacional.

Uno de los principales objetivos del nuevo proyecto de la FAO, que asistirá a Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y Uruguay, será establecer mapas nacionales de carbono orgánico del suelo y un mapa regional armonizado.

Estos serán herramientas claves para llenar la brecha de información que existe en estos temas en la actualidad, y así fortalecer la capacidad de adaptación al cambio climático y de mitigación de sus efectos negativos en el sector agrícola.

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Industrial Farming is Driving the Sixth Mass Extinction of Life on Earth, Says Leading Academic

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‘Re-imagining a world with less stuff but more joy is probably the way forward,’ says Professor Raj Patel

Author: Ian Johnston | Published: August 26, 2017

Industrial agriculture is bringing about the mass extinction of life on Earth, according to a leading academic.

Professor Raj Patel said mass deforestation to clear the ground for single crops like palm oil and soy, the creation of vast dead zones in the sea by fertiliser and other chemicals, and the pillaging of fishing grounds to make feed for livestock show giant corporations can not be trusted to produce food for the world.

The author of bestselling book The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy will be one of the keynote speakers at the Extinction and Livestock Conference in London in October.

Organised by campaign groups Compassion in World Farming and WWF, it is being held amid rising concern that the rapid rate of species loss could ultimately result in the sixth mass extinction of life. This is just one reason why geologists are considering declaring a new epoch of the Earth, called the Anthropocene, as the fossils of soon-to-be extinct animals will form a line in the rocks of the future.

The last mass extinction, which finished off the dinosaurs and more than three-quarters of all life about 65 million years ago, was caused by an asteroid strike that sent clouds of smoke all around the world, blocking out the sun for about 18 months.

Prof Patel, of the University of Texas at Austin, said: “The footprint of global agriculture is vast. Industrial agriculture is absolutely responsible for driving deforestation, absolutely responsible for pushing industrial monoculture, and that means it is responsible for species loss.

“We’re losing species we have never heard of, those we’ve yet to put a name to and industrial agriculture is very much at the spear-tip of that.”

Speaking to The Independent, he pointed to a “dead zone” – an area of water where there is too little oxygen for most marine life – in the Gulf of Mexico that has grown to the same size as Wales because of vast amounts of fertiliser that has washed from farms in mainland US, into the Mississippi River and then into the ocean.

“That dead zone isn’t an accident. It’s a requirement of industrial agriculture to get rid of the sh*t and the run-off elsewhere because you cannot make industrial agriculture workable unless you kick the costs somewhere else,” he said.

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Farmland Can Sequester Carbon From the Atmosphere

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Author: Jan Sluizer | Published: August 21, 2017

SAN FRANCISCO —
California rancher John Wick says the Marin Carbon Project could help save the world from climate change.

“How would you possibly know, looking out at this beautiful day in front of us, that the Earth is crashing?” he asks, rhetorically. “But when scientists measure it and see the effect of it, and watch the ocean die-off and everything happening, this is scary as hell. And, then, we have evidence that there might be something that could stop that. And, then, we had measurement of something that holds promise to actually reverse it.”

That “something” is carbon farming, using processed compost to cool the Earth. It’s a theory developed by rangeland ecologist Jeff Creque, who also promotes beneficial land management practices to increase the health of agricultural systems.

“Agriculture is the art of moving carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the vegetation to the soil and, then, back again,” he says, explaining, “If we can increase the rate of carbon capture and decrease the rate of carbon loss, we can actually begin to bend that Keeling curve of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the other direction, which is what we need to achieve.”

Wick met the ecologist when he turned to him for help restoring his ranchland, which had been overgrazed by cattle, and overrun with invasive weeds and brush. After implementing a strategic grazing disruption plan Creque designed, deep-rooted native flora gradually returned to the property.

Wick was now a firm believer in Creque’s theories, and to prove them, they founded the Marin Carbon Project. In December, 2008, they covered a carbon-depleted test plot on Wick’s land with one and a quarter centimeters of processed compost, next to another grazed test plot without compost. They wanted to see if the compost-treated land would pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and sequester durable carbon during photosynthesis.

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Fashion Revolution Week. The Only Fashion Week Worth Caring About

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Fashion Revolution Week 2017 was our biggest and loudest to date

Author: Carry Somers | Published: August 11, 2017

Our movement continues to grow, with more people than ever calling for a fairer, safer, more transparent fashion industry.

From Australia to Brazil, Uruguay to Vietnam, we saw 2 million people engage with Fashion Revolution in April through events, posting on social media, viewing our videos or downloading resources from our website. 66,000 people attended around 1000 Fashion Revolution events, from catwalks and clothes swaps, to film screenings, panel discussions, creative stunts and workshops. A further 740 events took place in schools and universities, assisted by our network of 120 student ambassadors around the world.

More people want to know #whomademyclothes

As in previous years, our social media impact was immense, with 533 million impressions of posts using one of our hashtags during April – an increase of almost 250% on last year.

Over the week we have been joined by hundreds of celebrities and influencers including internationally-recognised names such as actress Emma Watson, pro-surfer Kelly Slater, artist Shepard Fairey, editor-in-chief of Marie Claire Italia Antonella Antonelli, Brazilian actress Fernanda Paes Leme, Nobel Prize Winner Professor Yunus and cooks Jasmine and Melissa Hemsley, and Bangladeshi ex child worker Kalpona Akter.

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Can Big Money Fix a Broken Food System?

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Financial services firms are increasingly directing investor dollars into regenerative agriculture and other systemic food projects.

Author: Lisa Held | Published: Civil Eats

Massive venture capital investments in food make for a steady stream of splashy, dramatic headlines.

Juicero raises $120 million; reporters discover you can “juice” their product without the help of the $400 machine. Hampton Creek raises $220 million; board members bolt after a series of scandals. Blue Apron raises $200 million; its IPO performs terribly.

But behind this high-profile obsession with the Next Big Thing, a number of impact investors are also raising capital for other types of food and agriculture projects that they believe have the potential to fix a broken food system.

A growing number of investment companies in this realm are now using capital to help ranchers switch to 100 percent grass-fed beef production, connect small farms to communities with little access to fresh food, and transition farmland used to grow commodity corn and soy to organic, regenerative systems.

“There’s total momentum right now around people rethinking about how their money is being put to work,” says Kate Danaher, the senior manager of social enterprise lending and integrated capital at RSF Social Finance. “Impact investing as a whole is growing very quickly, and my guess is that if you polled everyone interested, the most popular sector is sustainable food and ag.”

In fact, according to the Global Impact Investing Network’s most recent survey, 63 percent of impact investors said they were putting their dollars into food and agriculture, and impact investment in the sector has grown at an annual rate of 32.5 percent since 2013.

Those in the space say capital is what sustainable agriculture needs in order to scale up. But critics warn that the money comes with risks, when the priority is ROI and corporate ownership of farmland becomes the norm. “Agriculture is a whole culture of how to work with the earth,” says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, which looks critically at land and agriculture investments around the globe. “When it’s driven by profit, it can be very dangerous.”

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CGIAR Gets Serious About Soil Carbon as Home of 4p1000 Initiative

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CGIAR will host 4p1000, a new initiative which places soils at the heart of climate solutions

Author: Alain Vidal | Published: August 23, 2017

To help us halt the warming of our world, it is time to take a good look beneath our feet. Capturing soil carbon in soils is one of our best bets for mitigating significant greenhouse gas emissions.

At the recent Eat Forum in Stockholm, Johan Rockström and Walter Willet reminded us of this in their State of People and the Planet speech, which highlighted that reaching the Paris Agreement goal will be challenging and require an ‘agrarian revolution’, where our food system becomes part of a global roadmap for rapid decarbonization. Sequestering more carbon in the soil is an option that would significantly contribute to meeting the Paris Agreement goal.

However, we still lack the knowledge needed to sustainably manage soil for carbon sequestration. Launched during COP21 under the leadership of the French Government, the global 4p1000 initiative is currently rallying effort to overcome this gap.

On paper, a 0.4% annual growth rate of carbon stored in soils would make it possible to stop the present increase in atmospheric CO2. In the real world of agricultural and forest soils, this target may be difficult to reach or limited in time, but any effort towards storing carbon in soils or halting carbon release, especially from agricultural soils, would dramatically move our food system from the ‘bench of culprits’ to part of the solutions to mitigate climate change.

But there is more. Farmers and agronomists have known for centuries that more carbon in soils means more fertility, less erosion and better water storage. This means better adaptation to increased climate variability and better income for farmers, yielding better food and nutrition security, especially in the developing world.

The 4p1000 secretariat is now hosted by the CGIAR System Organization, under an agreement signed in Montpellier on 29 June, 2017. The initiative provides a multi-stakeholder platform to facilitate partnerships, bringing together more than 250 contributors in both the public and private sectors under the framework of the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (LPAA) of the UNFCCC. The initiative will promote research-based solutions along four pillars:

• a multi-stakeholder platform to facilitate partnerships
• a tool to assess projects based on a set of references and indicators
• an international research program exploring the potential of soil carbon sequestration, innovative soil practices, the required enabling environment, and the monitoring, reporting and verification of solutions
• a digital resources center on carbon in soils

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Future Policy Award 2017: Desertification

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Published: August, 2017

Future Policy Award 2017: Celebrating best policies to combat desertification

We must not let our future dry out! These seven laws and policies demonstrate that land restoration can be a reality. They work towards a land degradation-neutral world as envisioned in the Sustainable Development Goal 15, and tackle desertification, one of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Desertification and land degradation are a threat to food security, livelihoods and health of hundreds of millions of people. It is estimated that 135 million people are at risk of being displaced by desertification, and drylands are the most conflict-prone regions of the world. Climate change, and the increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather in arid lands, makes combating desertification even more vital.

In partnership with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the 2017 Future Policy Award highlights laws and policies that effectively address land and soil degradation, and the related risks to food security and livelihoods, and help secure a sustainable and just future for people living in the world’s drylands.

The Winners

GOLD
Ethiopia, Tigray Region: Conservation-Based Agricultural Development-Led Industrialization (1994), supported by Mass Mobilization Campaigns (1991) and the Youth Responsive Land Policy (2008)

The Tigray region’s interpretation of Ethiopia’s development strategy focuses on food self-sufficiency and economic growth by conserving land and promoting sustainable agriculture. Thanks to a unique combination of collective action, voluntary labour and the involvement of youth, the people of Tigray are restoring land on a massive scale.

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